Ben has turned 6! Crazy talk. Firmly school age, no more possibility of preschool age.
There's a lot of things with Ben I haven't shared much online. I feel like I don't want a search engine turning up his kindergarten struggles in 20 years. That said, I also don't want to pretend our lives are picture perfect. Where does that leave me? Generalities haha. Ben is not a model student. If you want to chat about it, you can pm me.
So with that out of the way, all the great things! Ben is crazy smart, (perhaps too smart for his own good). He loves to learn, but hates being told he has anything to learn. He is quite intuitively good at math. He has a huge vocabulary. He loves board games. He plays many that involve complex strategies. His most recent obsession is various iterations of risk. He finally has gotten over his dread of losing enough to start playing chess with other kids at keyzone and more readily play head to head at home.
He is obsessed with military - history, custom, strategies. He recently met a real veteran (we don't know many) is infatuated. He also loves flags, army symbols, maps, etc
He loves nature shows, whether they be space or animals.
He is a home body. He would much rather stay home and play board games than go anywhere.
His favorite part of school is show and tell. The only problem is he always wants to take board games, which are way too large and easy to ruin. In December he solved this by making a paper copy of Chinese chess to take.
At school he talks about lots of friends. They play a game called "Savage" at recess, which is too imaginary for me to follow despite Ben spending plenty of time explaining it to me.
He still loves starwars, though we have not allowed him to see epi 7/8 and have cut way back on this viewing it in general. But he still loves the ships and characters.
He is a pack rat. Anything is precious to him and he hates things being thrown out, whether it is a broken toy or his sister's stained t-shirt.
He loves his sisters, although F is constantly wrecking his games. He still loves wrestling with her. He loves giving Amelia hugs.
He loves being read to. He loves audio books, the magic treehouse series is our go-to. He was scared of Harry Potter for a bit but is interested in it again, and many of his other recent fears (of going upstairs alone, for example) seem to be dissipating.
For Ben's birthday, we celebrated with a Brinner Party at Willowick farm, he had a ball. We will follow up with a flag-themed party for his friends in a couple of weeks.
We love you Ben!!
